Simple candle box hand tool project

My nephew needed a box to keep his gameboy, iPod etc. from getting lost all the time and I wanted to introduce him to woodworking, so I dragged him away from the Wii for a couple of hours to build this box with me.

The box is 3/4 pine, with ploughed grooves in the top and bottom. The corners were rebated with a carcass saw, cleaned up with a shoulder plane and nailed, so that we could continue working on it while the glue dried. One end of the lid panel was left long so that I could cut a tenon to fit through the frame on the end (a detail from an old example on the internet). The ring was a left-over that lets him pull it out from under the bed easier.

He’s a bit of a Calvin (& Hobbes) kid in that, as I handed each tool to him, it was transformed into either a blaster or a light-saber. I took over the final fitting of the panel with a moving fillister and when I was done, I turned to see he’d been fooling around with the shavings. All in all, it was a fun, worthwhile and manageable project.

That last photo of the bits of wood is the thing that made the biggest impression on him. I started out by splitting a piece off some firewood, he sawed the ends off and then planed down the sides. The idea was to give him a sense of what the wood in the lumber yard starts out as. He was pretty excited by the results and wanted to take that picture.

-- “The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ― Mark Twain